Car Bombing Injures Dozens in Hezbollah Section of Beirut

BEIRUT, Lebanon — A car bomb tore through a parking lot in the heart of Hezbollah territory in the southern suburbs of Beirut on Tuesday morning, a bold attack on Lebanon’s most powerful political and military player. The bombing increased fears that the spillover from the war in neighboring Syria was entering a dangerous new phase.

Some supporters of Hezbollah, the Shiite Muslim militant group and political party, angry at the worst attack in years in a neighborhood it tightly controls, blamed Lebanese or Syrian militants who back the Sunni-led uprising in Syria, which Hezbollah opposes.

The blast, in the Bir al-Abed district, injured 53 people, Lebanese officials said. No one was killed, though the parking lot was near a supermarket where people were shopping for food to break one of the first fasts of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

The bombing aggravated fears here that Hezbollah or its supporters would face attacks in response to the group’s military intervention in Syria against the uprising that is challenging its longtime ally President Bashar al-Assad. That conflict has deeply divided Lebanon and strained its fragile political balance, and Hezbollah’s involvement has left some supporters bracing for reprisals and feeling ambivalent about fighting fellow Arab Muslims.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombing. Syrian opposition leaders denounced it, and Lebanese leaders across the political spectrum scrambled to urge calm.

Image

A firefighter tried to extinguish fires from an explosion in Beirut's Bir al-Abed neighborhood on Tuesday.CreditAgence France-Presse — Getty Images

One worry has been that car bombs would strike the sprawling southern suburbs of Beirut, where Hezbollah has many offices and supporters. Some Syrian rebel commanders have threatened to attack Hezbollah there. Near the bomb site, shop owners said they were surprised because they had seen Hezbollah increase security in the area.

As black smoke towered over streets hung with peach and turquoise paper lanterns to celebrate Ramadan, the fear was that Lebanese Sunni Muslim supporters of the Syrian uprising, or some of the nearly 600,000 Syrians who have fled to Lebanon, were involved.

But Hezbollah officials made no such allegations. Instead, one of the party’s representatives in Parliament, Ali Ammar, blamed “Israel and its agents,” a line that many residents who poured into the streets quickly echoed.

Surprisingly, so did Saad Hariri, the leader of the Future Movement, the Sunni party that is Hezbollah’s main political rival and that is often criticized by Hezbollah as being too tolerant of Israel and too close to the West.

A possible reason, said one Hezbollah supporter who spoke on condition of anonymity because she was contradicting Hezbollah officials, was to keep the peace. “It’s better to say it’s an Israeli act,” she said. “Who could control the street if Hezbollah accused the Syrian opposition? We would see massacres if this happened.”

Image

CreditThe New York Times

Israel’s defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, said Israel was not involved. “This is essentially about a struggle between the Shiites and the Sunnis, also within Lebanon,” he said.

Hezbollah has portrayed the Syrian uprising as an Israeli-backed plot to destroy its alliance with Mr. Assad against Israel.

But Ali Fayyad, a Hezbollah lawmaker, warned against hasty conclusions, saying no Hezbollah figure appeared to be the target of the bombing.

Ali Suleiman, 45, sitting outside his shop near the bomb site, painstakingly winding copper wire to repair a generator, called the attack “a small message.”

He blamed Israelis; asked about Syrians, he said, “the Syrians are Israelis.”

Some residents pointed fingers at followers of a provocative Sunni cleric, Sheik Ahmad al-Assir, who has regularly called on Sunnis to join the Syrian uprising and issued sectarian threats against Hezbollah. Mr. Assir and his followers were driven from his base in the southern city of Sidon two weeks ago during deadly clashes with the Lebanese Army; some accused Hezbollah of taking part in the battle.

Image

Firefighters and residents at the site of an explosion in the Bir al-Abed residential suburb of Beirut, on Tuesday.CreditWael Hamzeh/European Pressphoto Agency

The bombing prompted a chaotic reaction on streets that Hezbollah normally keeps orderly, even during protests. Near the parking lot, where the burned metal frames of half a dozen cars lay tangled, chants of support for Hezbollah suddenly erupted into angry boos as a car carrying Lebanon’s interior minister, Marwan Charbel, drove up.

Nearby, the bomb had twisted the iron window frames of the Mirvay Patisserie, where chocolate muffins lay among sandlike piles of crumbled glass. A worker shoved them into the street, appearing to take out his anger with his broom. Watching him, a 17-year-old girl, Manar, said: “We are young. We shouldn’t be thinking of battles. We should be thinking of other things.”

Qassem Nooreddin, 26, an architect, had rushed from his work site to the bomb site, still clutching building plans. He suggested that Israel had orchestrated the attack to make the Syrian rebels look strong. He said Hezbollah’s leaders would work hard to contain rash reactions, but that hotheads posed a risk.

“Lebanon is a dismantled society,” he said. “The people are poor and illiterate, and they will follow anyone.”

Only Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, can maintain calm, he said.

Hours after the bombing, residents cleared away barricades and returned to their errands. “People are not scared,” Mr. Nooreddin said. “For the ones who fought Israeli rockets, this is just fireworks.”

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Car Bombing Injures Dozens In Hezbollah Section of Beirut. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe